Clumsy with chopsticks but can't live without them... ** I don't post English translations of Japanese recipes without permissions from the recipe authors. But feel free to contact me about the dishes you're interested in.

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"OBACHAN" means a "middle-aged woman" or "aunty" in Japanese.
.*************************. Having moved back to my hometown in April 2009, I live in one of the desperately underpopulated areas in Japan now. Let me share my life in a real countryside with aging parents living in the same house. And here in Muroto -- the place where I chose to live -- you can hear the heartbeat of the Earth! ;)

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Wednesday, February 01, 2006

This was flounder, not left-eyed flounder. It’s funny that they look so alike, but their prices are so different.Of course flounder is cheaper --- that’s why I bought it.

Now, I have a confession to make. I’m terrible when I eat fish. It’s not so obvious when eating a big piece of grilled salmon with a knife and a fork, but when I eat Japanese-style grilled fish, like horse mackerel, with chopsticks, my plate is nothing but a mess. My grandma was an excellent fish eater. After she finished eating her fish, what was left on her plate was a beautiful skeleton of the fish. Boy, it was almost an art, honestly.

Now, which do you think I used to eat this meuniere, a fork or chopsticks?

12
comments:

ooo obachan! u changed ur template! i think it's much better now...easier to see everything. i love how u use almost 100% of the screen width.. i have a widescreen monitor so having a narrow little blog is such a waste of space >.<

You sound like you're a messy fish-eater like me. But it's not all wasted. I just throw the scraps with bones into a pot and made fish soup. It's already flavored with shoyu and lemon, plus the fried flavor, so it taste so good. Give it a try next time. Hope you like it. -lance

Obachan;I'm guessing you used a fork...ha ha....I'm so paranoid about swallowing a bone, that I pick my fish apart with any utensil I can find. You see, I once got a bone stuck in my throat and it was NOT pleasant. Now, I'm phobic!!!!!

Obachan, I am very bad at eating fish, too! If it's a simple filet I am fine, but I ordered hamachi kama at a restaurant last week and I was so embarassed! My plate was a mess.

That looks really delicious, though.

Why is left-eyed flounder so much more expensive? Where I live, the only way to buy flounder is cut up into filets already so I don't think anyone can tell the difference.... Kind of a shame, don't you think?

I'm okay with chopsticks as long as I deal with bite-size pieces of food. However, when slabs of meat or fish are involved I don't know how to handle them with the chopsticks. Sometimes, I think to myself, "do I bite into it first and put it back on my bowl, or do I use the sticks to mangle them into smaller pieces? Would it be considered improper etiquette?"

lanceWow, so nice to hear from you! Mmmmm…fish soup. Never thought about it but it sounds worth trying. Thanks for the idea. :)

carlynOh you must be kidding, carlyn. Did you think I used a fork to eat rice and miso soup from those bowls? Not until I break all my chopsticks ;). If the whole meal was in Western style, with rice on a flat plate, I must have used a knife and a fork, but not with this type of meal. I’m clumsy with chopsticks, but for eating fish, still they are easier for me to use than a fork.

I don’t blame you for being phobic about that. When I was about 5 or 6 years old, I got a bone stuck in my throat. My grandma took me to a jizo (guardian deity of children? – not sure if this translation is correct) near a graveyard, and told me to ask it to take away the bone. I did, and on our way back home, I suddenly felt nauseated and threw up, then the bone was gone. Perhaps it was some kind of autosuggestion or something? Anyway, the jizo is still in my hometown, I think.

jenI’m glad to find another messy fish eater. :)Here they say that left-eyed flounder (hirame) has more delicate taste than flounder (karei).Mmmm… it must be difficult to tell the difference by looking at their fillets only.

foodcrazeeThat’s exactly what my grandma always told me! Chopstick skill is one important thing, definitely, but I don’t think that’s all. To eat the fish like an artist, you must be able to eat those dark, bloody part and tiiny-tiny bones, too, because I saw none of them left on my grandma’s plate after she finished eating fish. What do you think?

katimugambalonNo, sorry, I used chopsticks. I can’t eat rice and miso soup with a fork when they are served in Japanese style bowls like those in the photo. When the rice is served on a flat plate, I feel no hesitation to use a fork to eat it. And if miso soup was in a flat Western soup bowl, and if I managed to convince myself, “This is not misoshiru (miso soup). This is Western soup happened to be seasoned with miso,” then I could eat it with a spoon and a fork.

Eating fish is a headache when you have to think about a proper manner, isn’t it? All my life, I have been avoiding to eat fish in very formal, traditional occasions. At my sister’s wedding, when I was in my best kimono, I didn’t eat the grilled sea bream in front of me, then they wrapped it up to go. I ate the fish at the hotel for my late night supper that night, making as much mess as I wanted! :D

Wow, that's an interesting story about the jizo. Is the jizo like a praying stand or a statue? When you say it's near the graveyard, is it always part of a graveyard or it just happened to be near the graveyard? Do people still pray at the jizo for children benefits? Sorry if I'm getting of the subject.

It was more like a statue, IIRC. Kind of hard to tell if it was part of the graveyard or just near the graveyard, because we weren’t sure where the border was. And in a rural place like my hometown, things like jizo might have been moved when the national road was constructed, so please don’t take this as an example of Japanese tradition. Some people might pray at the jizo still today, but maybe not for taking out a bone stuck in the throat… I think in that case a doctor is the first choice.